The Oxford University Museum of Natural History website, https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/, has moved to the Oxford Mosaic web platform. The engaging new site provides information on how to explore the museum, including guides to what’s on, events for all the family and museum highlights. There are also audio-visual and interactive elements incorporated to offer a unique design and user experience. The site provides a gateway to the museum’s vast natural history collections: Archive and Library, Paleontology, Art and Architecture, Zoology, Mineralogy and Petrology, and new material is continually being added online. The goal was to create a single unified database for all the museum's collections, allowing easy access for learning and research.
Oxford Mosaic is a web publishing solution that provides an easy-to-use interface for creating attractive, responsive websites and is centrally maintained and fully supported. The brief required high quality design and functionality to showcase the unique collections and engage the public in its calendar of events.
Nataša Stuper, Digital Content Editor at the Museum of Natural History, commented on her experience:
"The new site is great case study for the benefits of Mosaic. The staff at the Museum were very excited about the website revamp and all the new features we were able to add thanks to Oxford Mosaic. The new interface is easy to navigate, it comes with enriched interactive content that offers a more comprehensive understanding of the Museum’s important collections and its great services for the public. It’s also fully responsive for mobile use, and this allows visitors to have an informative and engaging experience."
The website is part of the Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM) division that is made up of the four University museums, the Bodleian Libraries and the Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. The Ashmolean Museum became the first department within GLAM to create a website on the Mosaic platform, launching a brand new website, www.ashmolean.org, last year.
The team benefitted from the migration of previous sites as only minor changes had to be applied in order to optimise the design of the site. The project has been a great testament to the adaptability of the central platform, allowing high quality websites to be created at a low cost.
